Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin readied the company’s powerful New Glenn rocket for its long-awaited maiden flight early Sunday, kicking off a high-stakes effort to go head-to-head Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the industry that dominates the Falcon rocket family.
While it will take more than one successful test flight to demonstrate the reliability needed to launch expensive NASA probes, high-priority national security payloads, and other commercial spacecraft, the New Glenn, a decade after Bezos announced the project , expected to be a viable alternative.
Blue origin
Mounted atop pad 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the 350-foot rocket is expected to launch Sunday at 1 a.m. EST, weather permitting, with a three-hour gap.
Like SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, the New Glenn’s first stage, powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines generating a combined 3.8 million pounds of thrust, was designed to be reusable.
After the rocket’s upper stage emerges from the lower atmosphere three minutes and 10 seconds after launch, the 58-meter-tall first stage will disintegrate and attempt to land on a 100-meter-long custom-built ship named after its mother from Bezos. Jacklyn, which will be stationed further out in the Atlantic Ocean.
Rough seas prompted Blue Origin to postpone the flight last week, but conditions appeared more favorable on Saturday and mission managers pressed ahead with plans for an early launch on Sunday.
From launch to touchdown: nine minutes and 28 seconds. While SpaceX tested its Falcon 9 landing system with an ocean crash before attempting an actual landing, Blue Origin is making the attempt during the rocket’s maiden flight. Appropriately enough, the company named the booster “So You’re Telling Me There A Chance.”
While the 23-foot-wide first stage is powered by liquefied natural gas, the 75-foot-tall upper stage is equipped with two hydrogen-burning BE-3U engines that together generate 320,000 pounds of thrust. They can be restarted up to three times in space, allowing the stage to place payloads in particularly demanding orbits.
New Glenn’s carbon composite nose fairing, which encapsulates the payload during the ascent to space, provides a volume of 16,184 cubic feet, large enough to house an entire New Shepard rocket, the booster Blue Origin used to launch space tourists on sub-orbital flights from the lower atmosphere.
For its maiden flight, New Glenn carried a Blue Origin-designed spacecraft known as Blue Ring, a kind of space tug that can house or deploy multiple satellites in different orbits while providing onboard computer support and even maintenance.
The flight plan called for the upper stage and its attached Blue Ring test vehicle to reach an elliptical orbit with a high point of about 12,000 miles and a low point of about 1,500 miles. The mission is expected to last five hours and fifty minutes from start to finish.
Blue origin
Blue Ring is equipped with deployable solar panels stretching over 44 meters in length, with 13 ports for hosted and deployable payloads and can accommodate satellites or other payloads weighing up to 2.5 tonnes on the upper deck. There will be no such payloads on the first “pathfinder” flight, but the spacecraft will be thoroughly checked in orbit.
SpaceX began launching its Falcon 9 rockets in 2010 and now dominates the global commercial launch market, firing 134 Falcon family rockets last year and five so far in 2025. SpaceX has successfully launched boosters of the Falcon 9 rockets 395 times first stage recovered.
SpaceX is also building a massive new rocket — the Super Heavy Starship — with a seventh test flight as early as Monday from the company’s launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. A variant of the rocket’s Starship upper stage is being built for NASA to carry astronauts to the surface from lunar orbit as part of the Artemis program.
About 225 Falcon 9 flights have launched 7,700 Starlink internet satellites since 2019, with thousands more planned. The company already has millions of customers around the world, giving it a formidable advantage over potential competitors.
Amazon plans its own fleet of more than 3,232 broadband relay stations, known as Project Kuiper. The company says it has booked up to 95 launches with Blue Origin, the European consortium Arianespace, United Launch Alliance and even SpaceX to get the data relay stations into orbit.
“Once deployed, the Kuiper System will serve individual households, as well as schools, hospitals, businesses, emergency response organizations, government agencies and other organizations operating in places without reliable broadband,” Amazon says on its website.
Whether Amazon will be successful against SpaceX in the space internet services market remains to be seen. But Blue Origin’s New Glenn will provide an alternative to SpaceX when it comes to launch services.
The rocket was designed from the ground up to be “human rated,” which will allow astronaut flights at some point in the future. If successful, the rocket will eventually be used to launch NASA space probes, classified military payloads, commercial satellites, lunar freighters and even piloted lunar landers for NASA.
“The New Glenn rocket is about significantly lowering the cost of access to space,” said Sean O’Keefe, a Syracuse University professor and former NASA administrator. “This will give SpaceX some serious competition. … These are exciting times in the space industry.”
